guide to the jewplexed

It might magically be "Midnight in Paris," in Woody Allen's new film, but what time is it for the Jews? As I was drawn, sitting in the darkened theater, into this romantic comedy fantasy, which uses the convention of time travel to repeatedly transport its protagonist Gil back to 1920's Paris, my mind did a bit of traveling too. In his travels back Gil seeks a golden age, and I wondered: was 1920's Paris a golden time for French Jews?

Coming between the Alfred Dreyfus trial in 1894 and his ultimate exoneration in the early years of the 20th Century, and the later wartime collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany, would the City of Light in the 1920's be a place where Jews would be accepted or persecuted?

Though the movie includes number of key historical Jewish figures from that period happily living there, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Man Ray and Leo Stein, I wondered if French attitudes towards Jews had improved since the previous century.

I would soon find an unexpected answer.

Absorbed with both question and movie, and blinded in the momentary flash of someone's iPhone, I found myself suddenly on a cobbled Paris curve. Soon a Peugeot Landaulet 184, familiar from the film, rounded the curve, stopped and offered me a ride. There was a newspaper on the seat; I read the date, 1927, and more-- once again a Jew was on trial.

In 1927, the French dailies (as well as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency http://archive.jta.org/ from which I quote) were covering the trial of Sholom Schwartzbard, a Ukrainian Yiddish poet and watchmaker who was accused of the murder on the streets of Paris of Symon Petlura. Petlura was the head of the exiled Ukrainian government, a man Schwartzbard held personally responsible for a series of pogroms which killed thousands of Jews including many of his own family.

After the shooting of Petlura, and the arrest of the Ukrainian avenger, Schwartzbard's flat on the Boulevard de Menilmontant, was searched by the police. I get out of the Peugeot and join in (no one seems to notice my anachronistic jeans and a "Shalom Y'all" t-shirt) as they find this letter to his wife:

"The time has arrived to avenge my unhappy people on Petlura who is guilty for the murder of thousands of Jews. I must fulfill my duty. I beg you to be calm. I alone will answer for the act of revenge. Farewell. I will not forget you."

So Schwartzbard is guilty right? Pas si vite mon amie.
schwartzbard midnight in paris
Schwartzbard

During the lengthy trial (which I didn't mind, hey I was in Paris) prosecutors accused Schwartzbard of being a Soviet tool, and cast doubt on Petlura's culpability. As the head of the Ukrainian separatist movement, they asked, was he "responsible for the massacres which were perpetrated by his lieutenants," and was he in a position to have prevented them?

At the trial's end, I am sitting in the courtroom a little more than a half an hour when the twelve Frenchman file in a give their verdict.

They declare "before God and their conscience" that Schwartzbard is not guilty. Their conviction represents a "thorough condemnation of the pogroms which had been ignored by the powers that were in the regions where they occurred..."

I walked with the crowd out of the courtroom, hearing exclamations of "Vive la France," "Vive le Republic" from the crowds both inside and out, and on the streets of Paris as well.

"In the Jewish quarters of Paris rejoicing was manifest."

It was a good moment in time for the French Jews; long before midnight.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association.